


turn my soul into stone

by engolras



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Dangan Ronpa & Super Dangan Ronpa 2 Spoilers, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Minor Character Death, POV Second Person, a pretty indulgent togami centric fic tbh, and a bunch of other characters are mentioned, which i've never written in before so this was an experience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 07:03:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7564738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/engolras/pseuds/engolras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are Byakuya Togami and that is the only thing that matters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	turn my soul into stone

You are Byakuya Togami and that is the only thing that matters.  You’ve fought to keep your name.  You’ve earned the right to keep it.  Your older siblings have no names now.  You keep having to remind yourself that you no longer have siblings.  You took their last name for yourself.   You will never see them again.  They will wander without purpose, without names, and without meaning, as good as dead.  You, the youngest of them all, took their lives from them in order to keep yours.  You are Byakuya Togami and you have earned the right to exist.

You are Byakuya Togami and you don’t understand your classmates.  None of them make any sense to you.  You’re only here to prove a point, that you deserve to keep your name and purpose.  If you weren’t able to get into this school, the scandal of it would be inescapable.  Your classmates, however, don’t seem to have any points to prove; at least, nothing that’s on the same scale as yours.  Every student is at this school to prove that they are the best in their field, but none of them need to succeed the way you do.  The strange thing is that none of them seem too concerned with their respective purposes to begin with.  Ishimaru, for all of his insistence that he is a model student, goes to great lengths to make time for his classmates - especially that delinquent Oowada - instead of dedicating every waking hour to proving his existence is legitimate.  Fukawa spends more of her time following you around than writing nowadays, despite her near constant scribbling at the beginning of the school year.  Naegi seems more focused on everyone around him than proving he has a right to be among them at all.  But none of this should concern you.  You are Byakuya Togami and you cannot let your classmates distract you.

You are Byakuya Togami; at least, you think you are.  You haven’t been very Byakuya Togami like as of late.  None of your classmates have verbally acknowledged it - not in your presence anyway - but you see them all looking at you as you continue to spend more time with them with a mix of confusion and approval in their eyes.  You wish you didn’t like the latter.  In fact, you wish you could get your act together and go back to your previously driven self instead of the boy who goes to great lengths to mask his legitimate care for his classmates.  You can’t bring yourself to call them friends.  You’ve never had friends.  You aren’t nearly as friendly with them all as they are with each other, but the fact that you think of them and wish to spend time with them as often as you do is still a problem.  It doesn’t matter if you aren’t even remotely close with them by any standards outside of your own; this is the closest you’ve ever been to others.  You are Byakuya Togami and you didn’t earn the right to exist by being close to people.

You wonder if your father knows that you aren’t Byakuya Togami anymore.  You’re about to be sealed into the school, the world outside in utter chaos.  You and your classmates are forced to call your families for the last time in the foreseeable future.  Your father doesn’t answer, and you didn’t expect him to.  The cameras installed around the school are up and running, however, so you leave a message to appease the principal - as he would force you to later if you didn’t do so now.  So you speak about your current situation as if you aren’t having trouble breathing at the mere thought of what might be happening outside, as if the deaths of some of your fellow students didn’t affect you in the slightest.  You talk about your plans for the company after this whole mess is “taken care of”.  You end the message abruptly, without saying goodbye, as you always do.  You wonder if you’ll ever find out if you managed to convince your father that you are still Byakuya Togami.

You are Byakuya Togami and you will make it out of this school alive.  You don’t really care if the others make it out or not.  You fought too hard for the right to live, and you are not going to let these people take it from you.  Maizono’s body in Naegi’s room and Enoshima’s body at your feet is all the proof you need that if you want any chance at leaving you’ll need to distance yourself from everyone else.  You can’t afford to get attached to any of them, seeing as most of them are doubtlessly going to die.  You’re not sure why you’re so convinced that you can’t keep yourself from growing attached unless you isolate yourself as best as you can, but you feel that it doesn’t really deserve questioning since it is a guaranteed way to keep your life without any of the lingering guilt everyone else will feel.  You’ve taken lives before, and you know you were not meant to feel guilt over proving that you are superior to your former siblings, so why should you feel guilt now over surviving while those unworthy do not?  You are Byakuya Togami and you fully plan to win your second killing game.

You are Byakuya Togami and you realize that it is entirely possible for you to die here.  The thought was at the back of your head while you rearranged Fujisaki’s body, but you silenced it as best you could.  A Togami does not die until they are ready, after all.  But nearly the entire courtroom is convinced that you killed Fujisaki now that Genocider Syo and Naegi have managed to frame you, and you’ve found yourself relying on Naegi and Kirigiri to lift the blame from your shoulders.  You’ve never relied on anyone before, and it is a terrible experience.  The only outward sign of your anxiety is your foot tapping, but the only one who’s noticed it is Ludenberg.  If anyone else has noticed then they probably passed it off as a sign of impatience, but Ludenberg made a display of glancing down at your feet and smirking at what she saw.  You make a conscious effort to keep tapping your foot, in order to make it look like actual impatience, once Naegi takes your calm demeanor for innocence - as if you would ever allow yourself to appear as anything but calm, even when facing death - but it slips your mind as an unintentional confession slips from Oowada’s mouth.  You are Byakuya Togami and you don’t plan on risking your life again.

You are Byakuya Togami and you’ve failed miserably.  Before this killing game began, you would have thought that that was an implausible sentence.  However, here you are on the verge of death again, this time thanks to your (failed) attempts at detachment from the others and your conditioning to disregard emotions in relation to all subjects.  You thought both would serve you well here, but that worked for only so long.  You knew logically, before Monokuma confirmed it, that Oogami’s death had been a suicide.  However the confirmation of it is what throws you even further off balance.  According to Asahina, you drove Oogami to commit an act you yourself will have to commit once you’re no longer useful, and you wonder if she’s right.  You don’t care enough to think too hard on it though.  The feeling in your chest isn’t grief so much as pity.  You are Byakuya Togami and you may have more in common with Celestia Ludenberg than you care to admit.

You are Byakuya Togami and that doesn’t mean anything anymore.  Your family, even those members who you’ve thought of as dead for years, is gone.  Your corperation is gone.  Your purpose, your motivation, your need to exist are all gone.  There would be no consequences if you died.  You are no longer useful.  You see now that you’ve been so dependent on the things you no longer own, on your identity, despite believing that it was all the natural order of things.  The natural order, if it ever existed, has been disrupted.  Now there’s nothing that sets you apart from everyone.  There’s nothing to win.  There’s no money, no title, no life.  And then Naegi somehow breaks through to you.  You really should be used to it by now; he got past most of your other walls over the course of the past few weeks.  What’s one more to him?  It’s everything to you.  He gives you a purpose, or rather he shows you one that you were too caught up in yourself to see.  You are Byakuya Togami and you can give that meaning yourself.

You are Byakuya Togami and inspirational words aren’t enough on their own to survive the world you now live in.  You aren’t surprised that your father was dead by his own hand when you called him before you locked yourself in Hope’s Peak.  Why would he let his life be taken by anyone but himself?  You’re continuously shocked, however, by how widespread of an effect Enoshima had, by how many admirers she still has.  You know that you were blind to the rest of the world before now, but it all still astounds you.  You won’t admit this to anyone, but you doubt that you’re able to do everything Naegi believed you could.  You don’t know how you or your fellow survivors manage to keep living through it all, but you start to get an idea of how the others do it when you see Fukawa with Naegi’s sister.  You can tell that they’ve grown dependent on one another, that Fukawa has no need to overcompensate when it comes to her bond with Komaru like she does when it comes to the bond she’s sure you share with her.  You suppose that the others may be finding strength in one another thanks to the emotional connections they formed.  You have no emotional connections.  You are Byakuya Togami and you force yourself to survive on your own.

You are Byakuya Togami and you watch the imposter.  You watch them imitate that sense of superiority and the continuous insistence that they are Byakuya Togami which everyone associates with you, while also managing to express their care for the others without dropping the act.  Naegi asks if it’s a good idea for you to be watching someone who is pretending to be you at all, and you refuse to listen to his misplaced concern.  You’re angry.  You’re angry because they are a better version of you.  You’re angry because they somehow manage to strike the balance between what you were raised to be and what everyone around you wants you to be.  You’re angry because you know your fellow survivors, people you consider friends, would trade you for the imposter in seconds.  You’re angry because you know that that’s your own fault.  You’re angry because you keep refusing to change, choosing instead to fall back into old habits.  You are Byakuya Togami and you watch the ideal Byakuya Togami die.

You are Byakuya Togami and “envious” is too soft of a word to describe you.  You watch Kuzuryuu start out similarly to you, and you watch him learn things you still haven’t wrapped your mind around yet.  He lets himself become emotionally vulnerable.  He somehow lets his values change without losing his sense of identity.  He learns not to feel shame in growing attached to others.  He owns up to his mistakes in ways you never could.  You wish you had the strength to get on your knees and cut your stomach open without even a guarantee of forgiveness.  You are Byakuya Togami and Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu is a better man than you’ll ever be.

You are Byakuya Togami and you finally realize that if the members of Ultimate Despair can change for the better then you may have a chance.  You remember everything now - your memory took a while to complete itself.  You remember how you grew attached to your classmates only to have your progress stopped in its tracks.  You try to start where you left off, and you try to move forward.  You know you’ll need help to do so, and you know that you’re not ready to outright ask the others about this yet, so you try to go about things as subtly as possible.  You think it works for the most part, although Kirigiri obviously finds your behaviour a bit strange.  But you learn that you can do things you previously thought were impossible.  You can look Asahina in the eyes, even on bad days.  You can talk with Hagakure without feeling the need to throw any insults.  You can be polite to Fukawa.  You can trust Kirigiri to help you with nearly everything.  You can thank Naegi for everything he’s done.  You can feel like you belong.  You can exist on your own terms.  You aren’t the Byakuya Togami you originally set out to be, but that doesn’t matter.

You are Byakuya Togami and no one can take that from you.

**Author's Note:**

> so yeah, there's that. i'm a bit of a sucker for togami trying to redeem himself and dealing with his identity issues if you couldn't tell. also i'm confused by the general lack of talk around the togami and kuzuryuu parallels. but yeah, i hope people like this. the title is a lyric from run with the hunted by skyhill (which i high key recommend).


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